I’m not sure if it was Demetre’s last blog post or the deafening crush of hearing “Twitter” come from every web, marketing, entertainment etc. person for the last few months, but it’s abundantly clear that Twitter is not going anywhere, and that’s a good thing.

Not to recant on my previous post regarding Twitter’s penetration – and after re-reading it, I realized that I sounded as if “your mom having a twitter” was a bad thing. Quite the contrary, it’s a fabulous thing for the web and for my industry. For at it’s most basic level, anything that keeps people using and talking about the internet is good for interactive shops.

That’s why I was especially stoked to see this New York Times article talking about how small businesses are using Twitter to get their name out there and connect with other customers and businesses.

One quote I found particularly poignant was the following from Anamitra Banerji, who manages commercial products at Twitter:

“We’re finding the emotional distance between businesses and their customers is shortening quite a bit.”

I think this is the real value in Twitter – immediacy & intimacy. Whether it’s breaking news spreading like wildfire through the “Twitterverse” (please slap me for using that term) like Michael Jackson’s death, or an impromptu Dave Chappelle appearance turning into a gathering of thousands of people, to much smaller scale things like that New York city street vendor broadcasting his location and menu items for that day, there’s nothing fresher on the web than a tweet. Read the rest of this entry »

Best Buy has just launched Twelpforce. The service allows for Twitter users to converse with Best Buy specialists on anything from selecting the best video game console to instructions on charging their new camera.

It’s refreshing to see a brand like Best Buy allow such an open dialogue with their customers and at the same time embrace a technology like Twitter in such a broad way. The new broadcast spots perfectly sum up the concept, conceived by our friends over at Crispin Porter + Bogusky.

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We use Amazon S3 as an easy and cheap CDN on many projects. Here’s some interesting things I learned recently while researching how to stop direct downloading or linking to media files:

1. Any file on S3 can be turned into a torrent by adding ?torrent to the filename.  As in http://bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/myfile.zip?torrent.  I read about this over here.
2. S3Stat looks like a useful tool for viewing your S3 logs.  In particularly, checking for direct linking from other sites.
3. You can make auto expiring links using S3 (documentation here).  This is the meat of what I wanted to find out.  Using the Query String Request Authentication (page 24 of the PDF) you can specify an expire time for a link.  As I take it (and we haven’t implemented this yet, so I’m not positive), you would set the read access of the file to “Authenticated Users.”  Then you would construct the URL to the file using your public AWS access key, the expire time, and then a signature that includes a hash of your request with the expire time and your private key.  So if you set the expire time to something only a few seconds after the current timestamp, that link should not be useable again.

I don’t often batch import layered files (PSD, PNG) into Flash or even copy graphics into it.  But what I DO find really handy is copying text between the apps.  This worked in CS3 but it’s gotten better (more accurate) in CS4.  You can copy a whole group in and the font, size, and color are all maintained (or close enough, you usually have to nudge line height).  This saves tons of time when you’re populating a whole FLA from a text heavy design while keeping the text editable for the inevitable copy change.  Notice in this video how I can bring in multiple text boxes at a time.